Earning Diplomas On Equal Ground U.s. Probes Whether Standards Were Lowered For Minorities

September 21, 1985|By New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said on Friday that it was investigating whether public schools had engaged in an ''offensive'' form of discrimination by lowering academic standards to make it easier for minority students to graduate.

William Bradford Reynolds, associate attorney general for civil rights, said the inquiry was begun after reports that some minority students had been placed in programs ''that were not teaching them the basic fundamentals but were geared to just getting them through and giving them a diploma.''

To avoid charges of discrimination, he said in an interview on Friday, some schools may have downgraded their curriculums to assure that large numbers of minority students graduate. ''If it's something that can be tied to race,'' he said, ''then it is highly offensive to the Constitution.''

The thinking behind the Justice Department's action, Reynolds said, is that by allowing minority students to perform at a lower level, the schools are, in effect, engaging in a form of racial discrimination that harms them.

An official of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, disputed Reynolds' statement that schools, in an effort to avoid charges of discrimination, might have created inferior programs for minority students.

The official, Keith Geiger, the union's vice president, questioned the need for a federal investigation, saying that the problems of minority students would be better handled through expanded government financing of remedial education. ''I have a hard time throwing my arms open to an administration that is consistently cutting education programs, particularly for the disadvantaged,'' he said.

Justice Department officials said that the investigation had been going on without publicity for several years. The delay in enforcement, Reynolds said, stemmed in part from the complexity of the investigation. ''There has been a lot of time spent on sorting through how we get our arms around this problem,'' he said.

The inquiry is consistent with a philosophy outlined by Reynolds, Attorney General Edwin Meese and other Reagan administration officials in public speeches. In their view, any kind of affirmative action quota for minority groups is wrong, even if it is well-intentioned, because it amounts to a form of discrimination based on race.